Day 19

In our schedule, today had originally been set aside for some beach time, but the weather in LA didn’t get the memo and it was cloudy by the coast (I think the weather forecasters like to call it “a heavy marine layer”)  The weather in LA can be strange it seems. 95F in the valley, a little bit cooler in the hills and 20 degrees cooler by the coast.

When we were at Santa Monica the other day it was 69 degrees, whereas it had been in the 90s before we drove down there.

Anyway, we decided to drive to Norwalk instead and visit Golf ‘n Stuff, which as its name says is a collection of four miniature golf courses and a few arcades. The reason for our journey there is that this is the same place that Daniel Larusso takes Ali on a date in the 80s classic ‘The Karate Kid’.

Laura used to play Karate Kid with her brother when growing up, although she had to play the baddie as her brother was always Daniel-San.

The golf courses are beautiful and immaculately maintained – for a miniature golf course.

We played 18 holes on course 3, which featured cool holes like a frosted gingerbread house, a fort and a castle. Lots of the holes were split level, so you had to try and sink the ball into the ‘best shot’ hole and it would then roll down a tube and pop out on the putting green. It was great fun.

We almost had the place to ourselves (well, it was a Monday lunchtime) and it was baking hot. After 18 holes, Laura was narrowly defeated by me. I clearly found my form on the last 9 as I was one under par.

In the arcade we spent lots of money on driving games, a motorbike game (which was awesome!), skeeball, air hockey and pinball. The Transformers pinball machine proved yet again that everything related to the film is actually better than the film itself.

We then drove to downtown to get parked, fed and ready for Taylor Swift.

After picking up our tickets at the Staples Center box office (which seemed to require the lady behind the box office to check everything on our ID about four times) we went over the road to LA Live to get some dinner. We put our name down for a table and sat and waited for our name to be called.

Everyone at the restaurant seemed to be going to see Taylor Swift as well. Everywhere we looked it was a sea of red, homemade signs, girls dressed up, people in costumes, homemade dresses. It was really sweet.

We seemed to be the only two people that were just dressed normally. We had a lovely burger but ate up quickly so that we could get into the venue and watch the support acts. On the way in to the arena Natalie bought a foam light stick for $5 (as I suspected she got bored with holding it quite early into the gig). We made our way through the crowd and to our seats which actually had a much better view of the stage than I expected, despite them being at the back of the arena. We managed to catch the end of the first support act, Casey James, I recognised him from a series of American Idol, he was good then and he was very good now, I enjoyed the couple of songs we saw.

Next up was Ed Sheeran, we weren’t too bothered about seeing him as we’d gone to a gig of his a while back and we weren’t all that impressed with him, he got a bit boring when watching him for a whole set. We watched a couple of his songs, he was good and America clearly loves him. We decided to make the most of his success and check out the merchandise store while he was on as the queue had been to big to bother with earlier. Now, usually we wouldn’t buy anything from a concert, but as we were in America and there was a t-shirt that we both liked we decided we would buy it, it would be a nice souvenir from the holiday. We also could wear our matching tees and look really cool when we go to see Taylor Swift when the tour comes to the UK!

We asked a girl to take a photo of us and got chatting, it turned out that her boyfriend was from London, they’d met at summer camp two years ago. They were both lovely, he was one of the only boys we saw at the concert. We also got talking to the two girls sitting next to us, they were from Orange County and had seen Taylor Swift quite a few times, we were happy when they agreed that the driving in LA was crazy, we were starting to think we were being big babies about it.

Finally, the lights went down, the audience screamed at about a million decibels, my eardrums almost burst and the drum beat of State of Grace started to play. Taylor’s silhouette appeared on a big curtain, everyone screamed even louder and then she appeared, the crowd went mad, two girls in front of us wearing customised matching dresses jumped up and down waving their arms and their light sticks, they didn’t stop jumping and waving until the concert ended!

The gig was amazing, she played almost all of the songs from the album Red and threw a few old songs in too, like You Belong With Me and Love Story. For a while Taylor came to a second stage at the back of the arena so we had a really good view at that point. Ed Sheeran came on stage and sang Everything Has Changed, a song that’s on the album. She also talks to the audience quite a lot, explaining the meaning of the songs as an introduction to what’s coming next. It’s clearly very rehearsed and all about emotions and being the best person you are etc, but as she’s got quite a lot of younger fans it works really well. I can imagine that the young audience would take a lot from what she’s saying and would aspire to be the sort of person that Taylor would be proud of!

Taylor Swift often has special guests join her on stage, especially when she’s playing in Los Angeles so we were hoping she’d have someone good come on for this gig. About half way in she introduced her first special guest, she was from the UK, she’d had a song that had been stuck in her head all summer and she knew everyone else would be the same. We were asked to welcome…Cher Lloyd. Er, Cher Lloyd? The Cher Lloyd from X Factor who the media hated and who hasn’t really been heard of for a couple of years? Yes, that Cher Lloyd. She’d apparently had a big summer hit with Want You Back and everyone in the stadium went crazy for her. After getting over the initial shock (and slight disappointment – she’d had Carly Simon a few shows back!), we danced along and realised that the song was indeed very catchy and we remembered that we liked (and voted for) Cher when she was in X Factor, it was nice that she was doing well over here. There was another guest Sara Bareilles (singer of Not Gonna Write You A Love Song), they did her song Brave. It was also good.

Before we knew it, the concert was over, we said goodbye to Taylor Swift and to the Staples Centre. We got back on the freeway, made it home much quicker than expected, we were ready to sit in traffic for ages but there wasn’t any! We watched a bit of Cheers and Frasier while faffing about and finally went to bed for the last time this holiday.